1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved system for the cataloging, inventorying, selecting, measuring, valuing and matching Intellectual Capital, and matching or inquiring of an individual's skills, and particularly to a system for finding candidates for an employment or consulting position having requisite skills, and more particularly to a system for creating a searchable knowledge base of individuals skills indexed in a hierarchical cataloging, measuring and valuation system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Historically, businesses have been forced to base the valuation of human skills (or “Intellectual Capital”) of individuals, whether for employment, training, or acquisition purposes, solely on past performance and education. Intellectual Capital has been defined many ways, but two of the more common definitions are 1) that Intellectual Capital is knowledge that can be converted into value, and 2) that Intellectual Capital is intellectual material that has been formalized, captured and leveraged to produce a higher-valued asset.
The terms “Intellectual Capital” and skills are often used interchangeably. However, it is important to note that skills (the knowledge that an individual has that they can apply to a task that is of value to an employer) are really just one part of the intangible assets encompassed by Intellectual Capital, which can also include patents, business relationships and customer relationships, for example.
Because knowledge and intellectual material are derived from human resources, one of the major tasks of Intellectual Capital managers is to transform human resources into intellectual assets. In the systems of the prior art, determining the Intellectual Capital of current employees or employment candidates has been inefficient, cumbersome and imprecise, often relying on subjective written skill descriptions that do not use any uniform, consistent or regulated terminology, which would allow for an accurate and systematic search and result in an unbiased and equitable comparison of candidate skills.
For example, an electronic search for employment candidates in this manner has typically been accomplished in the prior art by utilizing a database of candidate resumes, wherein the text of each resume is indexed in the database and is searched through a user interface. Because candidate resumes contain subjective written descriptions of the candidate's Intellectual Capital that can vary widely in terminology, standard key word searching of these databases to match a candidate's skills with the requirements of the position in question is inefficient and imprecise.
As the world moves into the information age, Intellectual Capital has become paramount in determining the future success of businesses wishing to participate in the “new economy.” The inability to capitalize on a company's Intellectual Capital, however, lies in its inability to measure it in any meaningful sense.
Accordingly, a workable and efficient system is needed for inventorying, measuring, and valuing an individual's Intellectual Capital, and to create a uniform inventory of Intellectual Capital that accurately embodies the relative value of that individual's Intellectual Capital in a particular situation.